[Peace-discuss] SC overturns campaign spending laws

[John W.]

On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 11:32 AM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:



> [It seems to me that the Court has decided this matter correctly.  Justice
> Kennedy is surely right when he says, “If the First Amendment has any force,
> it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of
> citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”


So you don't fine or jail them; you merely revoke their corporate charter
and seize their corporate assets.

Only in a Bizarro alternative world run by minions of Satan could the
spending of vast sums of money by artificially created "persons" be regarded
as "political speech" protected by the First Amendment.





> The argument in favor of neutralizing the First Amendment would seem to be
> that corporate money will be too influential in politics - as if that
> weren't the case now. Much of Obama's backing came form Wall Street - he got
> more there than McCain did - and we see how it paid off. When I ran for
> Congress as a Green, I argued that the campaign finance laws (like
> McCain-Feingold) were at best fig leaves, and they restricted many groups
> that were not corporations, like labor unions and interest groups. If you
> want to make money less effective in political campaigns, make TV time free
> to candidates - that's where most of the money goes.  --CGE]
>
>        The New York Times
>        January 22, 2010
>        Justices Overturn Key Campaign Limits
>        By ADAM LIPTAK
>
> WASHINGTON — Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two
> important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled
> that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in
> candidate elections.
>
> The ruling was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s
> most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business
> regulating political speech. The dissenters said allowing corporate money to
> flood the political marketplace will corrupt democracy.
>
> The 5-to-4 decision was a doctrinal earthquake but also a political and
> practical one. Specialists in campaign finance law said they expected the
> decision, which also applies to labor unions and other organizations, to
> reshape the way elections are conducted.
>
> “If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote
> for the majority, which included the four members of its conservative wing,
> “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of
> citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”
>
> Justice John Paul Stevens read a long dissent from the bench. He said the
> majority had committed a grave error in treating corporate speech the same
> as that of human beings. His decision was joined by the other three members
> of the court’s liberal wing.
>
> Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader and a longtime opponent of
> broader campaign-finance restrictions, praised the Court’s decision. In a
> statement Thursday he called it “an important step in the direction of
> restoring the First Amendment rights of these groups by ruling that the
> Constitution protects their right to express themselves about political
> candidates and issues up until Election Day.”
>
> “By previously denying this right, the government was picking winners and
> losers,” he said.
>
> The case had unlikely origins. It involved a documentary called “Hillary:
> The Movie,” a 90-minute stew of caustic political commentary and advocacy
> journalism. It was produced by Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit
> corporation, and was released during the Democratic presidential primaries
> in 2008.
>
> Citizens United lost a suit that year against the Federal Election
> Commission, and scuttled plans to show the film on a cable video-on-demand
> service and to broadcast television advertisements for it. But the film was
> shown in theaters in six cities, and it remains available on DVD and the
> Internet.
>
> The lower court said the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, usually
> called the McCain-Feingold law, prohibited the planned broadcasts. The law
> bans the broadcast, cable or satellite transmission of “electioneering
> communications” paid for by corporations in the 30 days before a
> presidential primary and in the 60 days before the general election. That
> leaves out old technologies, like newspapers, and new ones, like YouTube.
>
> The law, as narrowed by a 2007 Supreme Court decision, applies to
> communications “susceptible to no reasonable interpretation other than as an
> appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate.” It also requires spoken
> and written disclaimers in the film and advertisements for it, along with
> the disclosure of contributors’ names.
>
> The lower court said the film was a prohibited electioneering communication
> with one purpose: “to inform the electorate that Senator Clinton is unfit
> for office, that the United States would be a dangerous place in a President
> Hillary Clinton world and that viewers should vote against her.”
>
> The McCain-Feingold law does contain an exception for broadcast news
> reports, commentaries and editorials.
>
> When the case was first argued last March, it seemed a curiosity likely to
> be decided on narrow grounds. The court could have ruled that Citizens
> United was not the sort of group to which the McCain-Feingold law was meant
> to apply, or that the law did not mean to address 90-minute documentaries,
> or that video-on-demand technologies were not regulated by the law.
> Thursday’s decision rejected those alternatives.
>
> Instead of deciding the case in June, the court set down the case for a
> rare re-argument in September. It now asked the parties to address the much
> more consequential question of whether the court should overrule a 1990
> decision, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which upheld restrictions
> on corporate spending to support or oppose political candidates, along with
> part of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, the 2003 decision that
> upheld the central provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.
>
> On Thursday, the court answered its own questions with a resounding yes.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/us/politics/22scotus.html
>
>

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